Working at the Federal Street Yard, Continued

By John D'Angelo

By programming the East portal to generate a train every 15 minutes, there would be a 15 minute wait before any train entered the yard area, and this would be too long a period to have to wait before doing any activity. I solved this by creating a peddler train and having it sit on the approach track so that it could come into operation immediately. This way, as soon as the route starts up, the peddler train waits for 30 seconds then proceeds to the peddler stop and I can uncouple and place the first load of cars while the Portal is counting down. The download package includes a first session to get you started. You may want to modify it or create your own in order to use the cars and locomotives of your choice. Here are some screenshots of the start of operations:


Portal program for the passenger train.


Portal program for the peddler.


SW7 is placed on the Ready Track.


The first peddler is placed on the Approach Track.

When the session is started, the first peddler makes the stop. Using manual control, cars are uncoupled, the locomotive leaves, the SW7 moves over and couples up to the cars and moves them to the Team Track. Then the SW7 delivers them to the industries. On later peddler arrivals there will be a number of additional switching moves. The peddler locomotive will move under manual control forward, uncoupling the cars needed. The SW7 will take those cars and will add any loaded cars, then clear. The road engine will back up, couple up to the cars and go back on schedule. Don’t forget that you have 15 minutes to do the operation before another train starts moving down the mainline. You can save the route and continue the operation later on. Actually, there is no end to this operation, and once started it can go on for as long as you wish, dropping off, shuffling, delivering and picking up cars. It can get quite busy! If you find that 15 minutes is too tight a schedule, you can increase the pause time for the portal to what you prefer.

You can use LARS if you like. Just add the LARS industry tracks and program the peddler to use LARS cars. Here is a link to an article on using LARS.

You can use waybills to generate your traffic and a free downloadable waybill system is called the Mad River & Big Timber Waybill System. Al Barten wrote an article about that system “Waybills on the Black Canyon here.

Here is the link to the Mad River System.

Finally, Al Barten has designed a spreadsheet system for generating a switch list here.

All of these items can be used to enhance your operations. Even as I was writing this article I was thinking of new ways to operate the Federal Street route. The time could be compressed so that nighttime operations could happen sooner in real time, but also be shortened. You could add a baseboard on either side and build some holding tracks for special trains, such as a work train to be used when there is a derailment. The possibilities are endless. I have supplied Al Barten with the CDP for the Federal Street 2008 Freight Yard route and another for the first session. Feel free to download them and experiment to your heart’s content.

Happy rails to you!

John

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Article and screen shots ©2008 John D'Angelo. All rights reserved.

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